1.) For one thing your local customers represent immediate cash flow. Depending on your type of business, whether it's carpet cleaning, painting, window washing, etc. your customers are a way to make instant needed cash. You need to put food on your table and pay bills paid just like everyone else and there is nothing like immediate income to do it.



2.) Add-ons - one thing nice that adds to your immediate income is when customers add on extra work during a job. For example: If you are a house painter and you are painting their living room, they may ask you to paint one or more of their kids bedrooms. This adds a nice chunk of cash to your immediate profits.

3.) Customers are a testimony of your good work. Sometimes a new prospect will ask you for references. Having plenty of previous satisfied customers on hand to use as a reference works well. I even had one potential customer tell me "I thought they were your mom and dad the way they went on and on about you. They had a lot of nice things to say about you and your service!". Wow! Is that a reference or what?!

4.) Your customers can give you lots of great referrals! Without intending to brag, I have made thousands of dollars off of single customers many times over the years. This happens simply from them referring me to their inner circle of family and friends. Not every customers will do this but with the ones that do, I can trace 2nd, third, and even as deep as 6 and 7 generations or levels of new business all pointing back to one single customer referring me to their friends and family for painting.

5.) And the last way to realize a customer's worth is that they will probably call you back several more times to do some work them. Many times I start out doing a job for a customer and then they call me back for a series of other jobs. I have even had customers give me inside work to do at my discretion to fill in for rain days painting somewhere else! (How did they know?)

This is the proper way to know how much money a single customer is worth to you. Take all that into consideration and I guess each customer can be worth thousands and thousands of dollars to you over the years in your own local service business!

I know this from experience... I'm thinking about one customer in particular that during a 10 year span of painting for them, have called me back several times. This same customer has also given me some excellent referrals. I can trace new business 5 and 6 levels deep and probably deeper from just this one painting customer alone.

That's the exciting thing about owning your own local business. You get to meet a lot of fine interesting people. These are really great folks that have the resources to hire you with. And they have lots of friends who have lots of money to hire you with too! (I call that job security.)

The bottom line is this, if you treat each customer as if they were worth a million dollars to you and consider no job as being too small, they can eventually lead you to some great opportunities to expand your customer base.